'The Revolt of the Angels' by Anatole France

In 1921, Anatole France was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature. In 1922, the Roman Catholic Church added all of his books to its Index Librorum Prohibitorum (Prohibited Books Index), which was only abolished in 1966. Nowadays, Anatole France is quite unknown in the English-speaking world: of his many books, only two are in print in English: The Gods Will Have Blood (1912), published by Penguin Classics, and The Revolt of the Angels (1914), published by Dover Thrift in 2015. Reading the latter, it becomes obvious why the church banned France's work.

"I am about to reveal to you a secret on which hangs the fate of the Universe. In rebellion against him who you hold to be creator of all things visible and invisible, I am preparing the Revolt of the Angels."

TROTA has a slow opening: we are given the history of a French family and their library, and a mystery of missing books. It is not until chapter 10, page 36 of 165, that the story actually gets going. Maurice d'Esparvieu's guardian angel has been stealing books and educating himself. The angel has studied the Bible and the Talmud, and the scholarship surrounding them; has "devoured the works of theologians, philosophers, physicists, geologists, and naturalists"; has read and re-read Lucretius; and has concluded that God is a lying tyrant. Reaching this conclusion, and grasping the scale of the deception, turns Arcade into a revolutionist.

"I believe in the God of the Jews and the Christians. But I deny that he created the world; at the most he organised but an inferior part of it, and all that he touched bears the mark of his rough and unforeseeing touch. I do not think he is either eternal or infinite, for it is absurd to conceive of a being who is not bounded by space or time. I believe him limited, even very limited. I no longer believe him to be the only God. For a long time he did not believe it himself; in the beginning he was a polytheist; later, his pride and the flattery of his worshipers made him a monotheist. His ideas have little connection; He is less powerful than he is thought to be. And, to speak candidly, he is not so much a God as a vain and ignorant demiurge. Those who, like myself, know his true nature, call him Ialdabaoth."

The angel abandons his post as Maurice's guardian to begin his new life as a rebel. He meets other fallen angels to organize a second revolt against God. They plan to smuggle propaganda into Heaven, to spread knowledge of evolution and cosmology among the loyal angels ("It is certainly no light task, because the Kingdom of Heaven is a military autocracy and there is no public opinion in it."). They purchase weapons, make bombs, and ready themselves for all-out war with Heaven ("we shall carry war into the heavens, where we shall establish a peaceful democracy"). Four middle chapters tell the history of Heaven and Earth from a fallen angel perspective, with the rise of Christianity being a very negative event ("The Christians burnt books, overthrew temples, set fire to the towns, and carried out their ravages as far as the deserts.").

One can see why the Catholic Church banned France's work.

I enjoyed this book a lot, but then I can sympathize with Arcade. Reading the Bible made me respect it as literature - at its best, very beautiful literature - but the gaping plot chasms and inconsistencies were too infuriating to take it seriously as history or cosmology. I have also read and re-read Lucretius. I have read and written a bit about the polytheistic origins of the Bible. It probably also helps that I am quite a fan of Milton's Paradise Lost, which is a big influence on TROTA, and of Christopher Hitchens, who compared monotheistic beliefs to totalitarianism.

Studying the Bible also drew me towards Gnosticism, although I have not read as much about it as I would like. In the early centuries of the Common Era, Christianity spread rapidly throughout the Roman Empire, mainly amongst illiterate non-Jews who had little to no knowledge of the Jewish scriptures that their new faith was supposed to be concluding. When more Christians got access to these scriptures, they were a tad surprised at they found. Why was the loving God of love, as represented by Jesus, being such a prick? Why was he advocating and committing genocide? Why had he not fixed the world, if he was supposedly all-powerful? Why was there so much evil in the world?

Gnosticism resolved these plot holes. The Jewish God was insane, had limited power over the material world, and wrongly believed himself to be the One True God (and was rather insecure about this). The true God, represented by Jesus, was immaterial and had no power over the material world, ruled by the Jewish God and his angels. The Gnostics gave the insane god the name Ialdabaoth. It's a fun mythology; I should read its scriptures sometime. Orthodox Christians persecuted the shit out of the Gnostics after the Council of Nicaea; in 1208, Pope Innocent III declared a crusade against a surviving group of Gnostic Christians - the Cathars - found living in France, who were then annihilated.

Gnostic digression over: back to TROTA. Overall, the novel is very good. There is a sometimes bleak, sometimes cheeky humor throughout. After the slow beginning, the story advances at a decent pace. I thought the final chapter was superb. My only gripe is that the stories of the human characters (Maurice's family and associates) are not as interesting as the growing angel rebellion: I found myself wanting to skip the human sections, even though these provided most of the cheeky humor. I recommend this novel, and would read more of Anatole France's work.

'How Corrupt Is Britain?' by David Whyte

Corruption. Ugh, British corruption.

The other day I finished reading 'How Corrupt Is Britain?' by David Whyte, which was quite a depressing read. Learning about politics is certainly making me feel like I'm living during the End of Days, or at the start of an extremely bleak dystopian SF novel.

After a few wishy-washy chapters looking at the concept of corruption and how 'neoliberal' ideologies contribute to normalizing corrupt practices, the book moves on to specific examples of British corruption. There are three chapters on police corruption, covering the use of violence against peaceful protesters, institutional racism, and various cover-ups (killings, Hillsborough, Plebgate). This all undermines your faith in the British police, and leaves you wondering how much has been successfully covered up over the years.

This is followed by four chapters on government corruption, covering state sanctioned torture ('Cruel Brittania' by Ian Cobain is recommended for a more thorough history of British state torture), child sexual abuse cover-ups (Jimmy Saville and the BBC), the Private Finance Initiative (see previous post), and revolving door politics.

The final four chapters cover corporate corruption, examining Britain's tax haven empire (the UK, including its oversees territories, controls about a quarter of the global market for financial services), the dodgy activities of the Big Four accounting firms (PwC, KPMG, Ernst & Young, Deloitte), banking scams (pension frauds, endowment mortgages, PPI), and the normalization of obscenely high pay for corporate executives (in 1980, average pay for a FTSE 100 CEO was 18 times the average UK wage: in 2012 it was 162 times the average UK wage).

So I now have a rather bleaker view of Britain. I am wondering how Britain's corruption compares to other countries. If we want Britain to be less corrupt, how realistic, in the long term, are these goals? Power corrupts: the greedy and powerful - and possibly psychopathic - will find ways to bend the rules in their favor. What can we do when human nature cannot be changed? 

I am being too negative. Much has improved over the centuries, but the victories of the progressives seem so fragile and ephemeral. We have a bad habit of imagining history as roughly progressing towards a better society, but that is an illusion. We cannot rely on history to progress in the right direction of its own accord; we cannot rely on the liberal victories of the past being a permanent fixture on our political landscape. 

The Private Finance Initiative (PFI)

Politics. Ugh, British politics. The Private Finance Initiative (PFI).

PFI is a type of public-private partnership in which the government hires a private company to build and maintain some infrastructure - roads, schools, hospitals, etc - for regular payments over many years. It began in the Thatcher and Major governments of the 80s and 90s, and was extended under the Blair-Brown governments until it became a cornerstone of public policy.

PFI contracts are kept very secret, so there is little chance of the general public - whose money is being spent - finding out whether they are getting a good deal. The private companies involved have no formal responsibility to the public; contractual obligations are kept secret: PFI contracts cannot be obtained through freedom of information requests.

There is very little competition for PFI contracts: the companies that go for them often work together to rig the bidding process (one company will submit an unrealistically high bid, and then another will submit a slightly less unrealistically high bid, which comparatively looks like a good deal). The companies increase the costs after construction has begun: a recent analysis found that 719 projects with a shared value of £55 billion will cost a minimum of £301 billion over fifty years. Thus, PFI is a mechanism which redistributes wealth from the masses (the tax-paying population) to a rich minority (private company shareholders).

Source: 'How Corrupt Is Britain?' by David Whyte